The Organizing Challenge – Part 1

If you follow Your Life Well Organized on Instagram or Facebook, you may have seen the November 30 day challenge to a more organized life, #30daystoorganized. As promised, I’m devoting a blog post to summarize the daily organizing challenges as a handy reference guide. Here is part 1 of the series, covering Days 1 – 10.

DAY 1 ~ put away your Halloween <<or most recent season / holiday>> décor. Donate, trash or recycle anything not used this year. Check out my blog post, “Witches and Bats and Pumpkins Galore, Where Oh Where is my Halloween Décor?”, for more detailed tips on how to organize seasonal / holiday decorations. The tips included can be applied to any holiday or season.

DAY 2 ~ tackle the laundry room. To get started, pull everything out and group like items before re-shelving them. Do you have brooms and mops laying against the wall? Consider buying a wall rack to corral them in a consistent, off the floor, home.

DAY 3 – 5 ~ the 3 day drawer challenge. For the next 3 days, pick one drawer a day that could really use some love, to organize. The junk drawer, a bathroom drawer, the drawer in your hutch. Take your pick! Here is one of my kitchen drawers, the grilling and scissor drawer. The white baskets are from the $1 store and grey ones, more heavy duty for grilling tools, are from target.

The last day of the drawer challenge and here is my most shameful drawer! My wine and spirits drawer will be gorgeously organized by the end of the day!

Ahhhhhh…..much better now!

DAY 6 – 7 ~ today’s challenge is books! And I mean all books – novels, kid lit, cook books, spiritual….bring them all out, from every room. Start sorting and let the decision making begin.

And what to do with the books you no longer need…please donate! Children’s hospitals or Ronald MacDonald Houses are fantastic places to donate. I am also a big fan of donating to local nonprofits providing new and gently used books to kids and schools in need. Books make such a difference – pass them on!

DAY 8 ~ it’s a movie challenge. We store movies in 3 locations, the same 3 places we watch movies; in the family room, in the car (in a DVD case) and in our playroom. First step in any organizing challenge – pull out all your movies and decide what you no longer want or need. And this includes old VHS tapes, with the exception of old home movies which I want you to put aside in a memorabilia bin.

Here are my thoughts on VHS – unless it is a film you are willing to pay to have transferred to a DVD, which can be as expensive as buying a DVD, then throw them out. They take up a lot of space and you realistically will never use them again.

Now DVDs, if you have a huge collection I highly recommend tossing the cases and putting them all in a large DVD case. Save the valuable shelf space for something else.

Last tip – for movies you no longer want – check Amazon’s buy-back program, especially if you have a full set of TV or movie series. Or try to sell through a local Facebook sales group, but if you go that route, set a time limit. If they haven’t sold in one or two weeks, donate them.

DAY 9 ~ electronic game day challenge. The blue box is for the boys’ Nintendo 3ds games. Small, portable and allows me to toss the original cases. Fabulous storage solutions come in all sizes. And the Wii games were added to one of the boxes I used to store the DVDs in the playroom closet.

DAY 10 ~ today is CDs! If you have an extensive CD collection, the original jewel cases take up too much space. If you’ve been holding onto the cases because you want to keep the original liner (album) notes, then a fantastic solution is a box of CD sleeves from Staples and a durable storage bin from The Container Store.

For those of you that are not tied to the liner notes, research going digital. There are a lot of options these days, as well as diverging opinions on whether digitizing is the way to go. Just get informed and make a decision that’s right for you and your lifestyle.

Hope you were inspired by Days 1 – 10 and found a project or two you are ready to tackle! I will be back soon to bring you Days 11 – 20.